Grammatical stage (3-5)
Third Grade is the beginning of the Grammatical stage of intellectual formation. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning, calls this the "Poll-Parrot" stage, in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable. "At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things."
For the student observation and memorization are the focus of these scholastic years. This approach both trains the student's mind and helps him to gather material for use in the next part of the Trivium, the Analytical Stage.
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